Microsoft has been on quite a cloud roll lately and on Tuesday it announced a new cloud-based machine learning platform called Azure ML, which enables companies to use the power of the cloud to build applications and APIs based on big data and predict future events instead of looking backwards at what happened. The product is built on the machine learning capabilities already available in several Microsoft products including Xbox and Bing and using predefined templates and workflows has been built to help companies launch predictive applications much more quickly than traditional development methods, even allowing customers to publish APIs and web services on top of the Azure ML platform. Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president at Microsoft, was in charge of the Azure ML, and spent years at Amazon before joining Microsoft to lead this effort.